Co-designing for social futures: Playful and creative cities for older adults

A keynote address by Larissa Hjorth, distinguished professor at RMIT University

May 17, 2019, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.

B/OLD: Aging in our City presents “Co-designing for social futures: Playful and creative cities for older adults,” a keynote address by Larissa Hjorth, distinguished professor at RMIT University. This talk is part of B/OLD: Aging in our City's special programming on May 16 and 17.

Much of the rhetoric around smart cities focuses on technology-centric approaches. Health, as we know, is far more complex than technology and medical solutions might suggest. Understanding health and ageing requires us to grapple with the complexity that is the social (Gawande 2015).

Increasingly, we are building technologies with the notion of the social at its core through human-centric approaches. The datafied and algorithmic city is one in which the human (and its biases) can take a variety of ways — from redlining to playful cities. How might we playfully co-future for cities with growing ageing populations?

This talk focuses on creative and ethnographic approaches to how we might recalibrate the city as a playful and creative place that fosters ageing well.